Christine Dixie's To Be King at the Coronet (Artslink)

12 Oct 2017

Sulger-Buel Lovell announced that To Be King is one of two selected South African works, together with ‘A Guided Tour of the Exhibition: For Soprano with Handbag’ by South African artist William Kentridge.

Print Room at the Coronet presents an ambitious five-week festival of art from across the globe, spanning genres and defying expectations. Over 35 days the venue will host theatre, art, circus, dance and poetry with over 50 artists from 12 countries, celebrating great work, without borders, without agenda and without restriction. The Coronet International Festival runs from 25 October 2017 – 29 November 2017.

To Be King is a 15-minute film. Thus far it has been exhibited at the South African National Arts Festival 2014; Vienna in May 2015 as part of the Weiner Festwochen exhibition U/Tropia (curator Brent Meistre); the Cape Town Art Fair, Sulger-Buel Lovell 2015; Personal Structures hosted by the European Cultural Centre and the GAAF in Venice 2017.

About the Installation:

The project To Be King is the culmination of a sustained body of work over a five-year period. It is a multi-media installation that questions the status quo.

The painting Las Meninas by Velásquez (1565) and a subsequent essay on the painting by Foucault (1966) have been the impetus in developing this project. It is the insights into structures of power, social and psychological, represented by Velasquez and analysed by Foucault, that Christine Dixie used as entry points into this project.

“As Dixie’s work To Be King recontextualises the masterpiece template, Las Meninas ... roles are taken on, reversed, doubled, and relocated to the backdrop of a classic colony, the Eastern Cape. Dixie’s animations and multimedia interventions ... offer thought by way of a radical re-vision. What if, she says? What if the Infanta was black, and stood outside the frame of the picture? What would make this possible, what transmutation of thought and representation? How would it change things, if the Southern Cross was the constellation guiding the centres of political power and the rules of representation?” (Excerpt from an essay on the work by James Sey).

Christine Dixie received an internationally competitive Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship, which she used to research and develop the content of her current project, To Be King.

“Our institution is heavily invested in this project and thrilled to see the sophistication with which the artist has achieved this technically and intellectually complex time-based media installation.” - Dr. Karen Milbourne, Senior curator, The Smithsonian National Museum of African Art

About the Artist:

Christine Dixie (South Africa, 1966) completed her undergraduate degree at the University of the Witwatersrand and graduated with her MFA from the Michaelis School of Fine Art, Cape Town. She is currently a Senior Lecturer in the Fine Art Department at Rhodes University.

She has had numerous solo exhibitions; The Gendered Gaze (1993), Parturient Prospects (2007), The Binding (2010) and To be King (2015). Her international group shows include Earth Matters: Earth as Metaphor curated by Dr. Christine Kreamer (2007) and Divine Comedy: Heaven, Purgatory and Hell curated by Simon Njami (2012), both of which opened at the Smithsonian Museum of African Art. In 2007 she had a mid-career retrospective exhibition Corporeal Prospects that was held at The Standard Bank Gallery, Johannesburg.

Her work is included in national and international collections including The New York Public Library, The Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, The Standard Bank Gallery, The Johannesburg Art gallery, The Durban Art Gallery and the Iziko Museum of Cape Town.